Linguapax
Comment on the article “English is Global, so why learn Arabic?” (NYT, 30th January 2012)
When Summers (2012) told us as part of "what [we] (really) need to know" that "English's emergence as the global language, along with the rapid progress in machine translation and the fragmentation of languages spoken around the world, make it less clear that the substantial investment necessary to speak a foreign tongue is universally worthwhile", all those in favour of multilingualism and linguistic diversity may have felt to raise their own voice, in defense to this idea. The article "English is Global, so why learn Arabic?" hence published in the New York Times as a response to it, has offered a platform for precisely raising these voices. The following comment stated hereafter offers an additional viewpoint to the topic.
Indeed, the phenomenon of Englishization is at the same time a very fascinating and a very frightening process. Fascinating on the one hand, with regard to its potential of possibly unifying all the diverse people of this world by one shared language. Shared, but yet anchored in the identity of some of its users and used rather as an instrument of communication by the others. Frightening on the other, due to its consequences for the specificities in intercultural communication by each linguistic group and for our common heritage of linguistic diversity.
However described, Englishization is an ongoing process that is not reversible. And thus, the affected human beings, that is all and everyone of us, have to find a way of dealing with that situation.
There are many factors which actually play a role here. As Williams (2010) set out in his book on "The Knowledge Economy, Language and Culture", in today's knowledge economy, "the essence of work revolves around interaction and its relationship to the generation of knowledge", as contrasted to its preceeding industrial economy in which it had a different emphasis.
In the following, as "teamwork comes to the fore" he argues that this in turn "involves a recognition that effective interaction relies on language and culture, and that good teamwork insists on a shared meaning across all of its members". While making his argument Williams continously refers to the various disciplines that affect these changes, that are sociology, linguistics, economics and also political science.
In the following, we may assume that the learning of languages nowadays may also take on different forms, in the first stance always depending on the decisions of the individual. According to Gardner's Socio-Educational Model of Second Language Learning (1982), aptitude and motivation play the major factors in the acquisition of another language. He further divides motivation into integrative and instrumental factors. Whereas instrumental motivation involves a clear strategic goal, such as obtaining a job etc., integrative motivation rather appeals on the desire of an individual to take language as the way of integrating into and understanding a certain society with an own linguistic culture.
With regard to the "new knowledge economy", in which learning plays a key role, universities are taking on the role of the homes and factories of the investigators and researchers. And among those, English is indeed used as the lingua franca of academic discourse and discussion. So while it is not only a perfect asset but also an extremely practical tool, not to say, an almost indispensable one to nowadays engage into academic discourse and discussion using the English language, daily life experiences teach us that in the real world English is not (yet) forming a universal world of understanding.
A whole generation of travellers seeking to explore the world may find themselves easily in situations where they are reminded of the de facto existence of language diversity. A personal anecdote illustrating this is a dinner party in Barcelona with a whole range of international students all communicating via English except one visiting Ossetian girl who knows Ossetian and Russian but hardly any bits of English. Hence communication with her took place only thanks to those few multilingual people who could translate from English into Russian.
After all, the question, as so accurately formulated by Tusón (2004) remains: "if we all spoke English, would we understand each other [better]?".
Barcelona, January 31st 2012 by Milena Lütz
More information
http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2012/01/29/is-learning-a-language-other-than-english-worthwhile